We are pleased to announce that the ICIG Symposium will take place on June 6-7, 2018. The symposium will be hosted by the Corporate and Marketing Communication Association. We will meet this year in stimulating and inspiring surroundings right in the heart of the Alps. The symposium will be held at the Alpine 4* Špik Hotel (and SPA) in the scenic Slovenian Alps Region – Gozd Martuljek, Slovenia. Because we wish to keep the atmosphere small and cosy, we will limit attendees to 20-30, so please commit to us early.

Symposium Theme

Since 1994, when the first International Corporate Identity Group (ICIG) symposium was organised, the field of corporate identity & corporate communication developed tremendously and is now fully recognised among scholars and practitioners. In 1998 the new term corporate marketing was first introduced and has since been established as an umbrella term that underpins the family of concepts such as corporate identity and branding, corporate reputation and corporate image, corporate and brand identification, organisational culture, employer and internal branding, stakeholder relations etc.

In the contemporary social, political, natural and economic environment, organisations, especially mid-sized and large ones, have little choice but to become corporate marketing based. For a long time now, they are much more than just means for production, distribution and exchange of goods and services. As an organizational communities organisations are forced to act as social actors within a complex networks of relations, expectations, demands, interests and responsibilities. The critical public with its environmental and social concerns, demands an organisational shift toward a more sustainable and holistic approach. Organisational strategic management of their being, doing and communication is a must if they want to keep their social costs low and income high.

The 20th ICIG symposium would like to make a step forward and provoke a debate on general and specific issues within the corporate marketing. As such, the theme for this year's symposium is:

We are fully aware that corporate communication and corporate marketing as academic fields must be broad enough to allow the integration of knowledge from different disciplines as well as specific enough to allow for differentiation of distinct contributions. The theme of this symposium encourages academics and practitioners to use a multidisciplinary approach for expanding corporate marketing and related knowledge to the next level.

Symposium topics

To advance the state of research on the corporate communication and corporate marketing topics, we invite authors to submit their papers on issues which are crucial to the understanding and practice of corporate marketing in the decades to come.

The organisers welcome either theoretical or empirical papers as well as case studies, which focus on corporate identity, corporate branding, internal and employer branding, CSR and ethical branding, organizational and corporate communications, stakeholders management, corporate exchange and relations, corporate image/reputation, corporate trust, organizational moral blindness, scepticism and cynicism, internal organizational issues and culture and, more specifically, on corporate marketing as per the symposium theme. We want to challenge the question, how to give to an organisation of specialists a view of a whole so needed in the interconnected and data-driven markets.